


How You Know

by RyMagnatar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Humanstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyMagnatar/pseuds/RyMagnatar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you realize you love someone, and that they love you, are not always the moments when they say it. Sometimes it's just a feeling. Sometimes it's just something that they do for you. And sometimes you don't realize it all at the same time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 15

Trips out into the woods were a regular thing for Aradia. You, on the other hand, went out as infrequently as you possibly could. She had other friends that usually went with her; some you liked more than others. But this afternoon when she showed up outside of your door with a backpack slung over her shoulders and that smile that tells you she smells adventure, there was no one else but you.

Tavros was on vacation with his father. Vriska had ditched her for a beach trip with her best friend Terezi. Nepeta had broken her arm falling out of a tree last week and her mother wasn’t letting her out of sight. So that left you.

You. Aradia. And the forest that grew on the outskirts of town.

It was humid and disgusting and within ten minutes you were grumbling about how they made air conditioning, houses with insulation and fans for a fucking reason. She just smiles at you, disgustingly tolerant of your morose behavior and annoyed words. She doesn’t care about how the way the moisture in the air clings to skin and cloth like the overly moist hug of that great aunt you don’t think should even still be alive at her age.

You say so and Aradia laughs. She always laughs at comments of death. It makes others look at her a little funny but you like it in her. Your mother died when you were little. You had nightmares about it sometimes. Aradia understood that. She did too. It was one of the many odd things that the two of you had in common.

Aradia leads you through a thin trail in the woods. You hear more bugs and birds making noise out here than you ever hear reproduced in any soundtrack of any game ever. It makes you shudder just a little, thinking about those prickly little legs crawling across your skin. You jump when she turns back and grabs your arm. Your heart is pounding in your chest already.

She’s grinning, “You’re never going to believe what I found. It’s just up ahead!”

“I thought you found everything that’th out here already, AA.” Her hand slides from your wrist to your own hand. You feel the strength of her fingers squeezing your hand. Your heart is pounding for a whole other reason now. “You’ve been checking thith foretht out thince we were like five. Ithn’t ten yearth enough time to thee everything?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” She throws you an amused look over her shoulder. “This place is far too large to fully explore in only ten years! Especially since I spent most of that time in the same area! This is a whole new location I only recently discovered.”

Dragging you through shrubberies (the clingy plants make you shudder whenever they drag across your skin, all you can think about are ticks), Aradia stops only once. In front of a large fern, with bent leaves and footsteps around the base of it in the same pattern as Aradia’s explorer boots, she lets go of your hand. She gestures to the fern and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention please.”

“Oh my god,” you say in mock shock, “it’th a fern!”

“Sollux, you ass!” she steps forward long enough to punch you in the shoulder as you chuckle at her. Then she returns to the fern and says, “May I present to you the lost watermill of that infamous wild wild west gunslinger known only as the Demoness!”

She pulls down the large leaves of the fern and presents to you something actually somewhat interesting to you. An old log cabin sits on the bank of what was once probably a big river. The bank rises far up above the shallow stream that runs through the river bed now.

The building itself looks like it’s been standing for far longer than it was ever intended. The front door hangs off the bottom hinge and there are boards nailed across the windows. One of them is half pried off, with chunks taken out of the edges like something was ripping at the wood years ago.

Aradia starts walking right up to the front door and you can tell from the footprints still in the muddy ground that she’s been here before recently. She pulls open the front door with a grunt and then gestures for you to follow. “Come on Sollux! Hurry up. Don’t just stand there gaping like a bag of bones!” you hear her laughter even as she steps into the mill.

With a sigh, you follow in her footsteps up to the door. You look at it a little closer before stepping inside. There are strange markings all around the door frame. It looks like someone was clawing at the wood. You trace your fingers over the markings and shiver, even in this humidity.

 What the hell happened in this place?

“You’re dawdling!” She calls. She’s halfway up a ladder to the second floor. Aradia grins down at you, gesturing for you to follow her.

“You don’t want me to check out this first floor? Look there’th a wooden table here and a chetht.” You head over to the ladder anyway.

“I checked all that out before,” On the second floor Aradia is kneeling on the wooden floor. There are gaps between the planks that are two inches wide. “Just some boots that I asked my dad to get repaired for me. Everything else got eaten by moths and rats. But come up here! We can get onto the roof from here.”

“The roof? Ith that a good idea?” She’s crawling across the floor towards a window on the far end. The wood squeaks as she moves across it. At the window she gets to her feet and waves to you again.

“Stop being a baby and get over here!” The floor creaks worse when you crawl across. By then Aradia’s pushed open the window’s planks open and she’s got one leg out. “You’re going to love the view from out here.”

The next moment has her out the window and climbing up on the roof. You lean out and make the mistake of looking down. There are fallen trees and probably thorny shrubs covering rocks just down below. “AA, thith ith fucking crazy.”

“Just shut up and get up here!”

“If I fall and break my leg I am going to kick your ath.”

“I love your indiscriminate violence towards anyone who annoys you,” Aradia says, standing, “Just get up here and stop looking down. If you throw up because of the heights you’re just going to make this place stink.”

She’s at the top of the building, standing beside the wooden wheel that’s attached to the side of the building. It’s one of those large wheels that would turn, pushed by water, that are on some of those weird river boats that you’ve seen on the south river. “Hey, be careful over there. None of this looks thafe at all.”

Waving her hand at your words dismissively, Aradia walks along the top of the roof to the wheel and pushes on it. The wood groans loudly as it begins to move slowly. “Look at this, it still works! If this river was back to the level it is supposed to be at, this wheel would have never stopped turning!”

“It would have broken off long ago if that wath the cathe.” Aradia pushes the wheel again, harder, and you put your hands over your ears and curse.

She laughs and pushes it again.

You climb up to the top of the roof, on the same level as Aradia, and make your way cautiously over there. “Jutht be careful all right?”

“Don’t worry Sollux. Nothing is going to happen, see?” She stomped her feet on the roof. Shingles a few feet down slid off the roof and hit the ground. “Nothing at all.”

You look down at the new hole and frown. “We are tho fucked up here.”

“Oh relax. You’ve got such a doom and gloom complex!” She pats the wooden wheel to keep it rolling. It groans again and you take a step towards her.

“I’m theriouth, you thhould thtop mething with all thith.”

“I’ve been up here before. This building has been standing for years. Us walking around a little on the top isn’t going to wh- woah!” There was a sickening crunching sound of wood splintering. Right before your eyes, the water wheel began to fall away, taking part of the roof and the wooden cabin with it. Aradia stumbled back, her hand on the wheel’s top, and her eyes were enormous as she fell backwards.

You stand in shock, in horror, as you watch her long hair streaming through the air as she disappears from view.

You don’t have longer than a few seconds to stay there before the roof begins to creak and the shingles start to fall off. It bends underneath your feet and you turn and hurry to the roof’s opening. After a few steps the wood gives out underneath you and you go falling through the roof onto the thing, unstable wood of the second floor.

Winded, lying on the second floor, you get a moment or two to try and fight for your breath in this cloud of woody dust before you hear the tell-tale creaking of the wood underneath you. You manage one curse, curling into a ball as you do it, while the planks give out below.

When the dust settles, you’re lying with a few planks of wood in pieces around you and under you. You push off one, then another, and sit up slowly. Your toes still work, and all of your fingers. Your back is sore as fuck, and you’ve got more than a few handfuls of bruises growing.

Picking your way through the debris, you push open the door and escape. You cough out the dust from your lungs and put your hands on your knees to catch your breath. As soon as you’re able, you hurry around the building and towards the river. “AA? Aradia? Are you okay? Where are you?”

For the longest moment you hear nothing but the trickling of water. You can’t breathe. You can’t move. All you can see is broken wood and the gaping hole in the back of the building

“In the river!”

You reach the bank and then skid to a stop. The wheel took out half the bank below it, reducing this part to a slippery slope made of rubble of dirt and pebbles. You stand at the top and look down.

Aradia sits in the water, knees and toes in the shallow river. She’s got a cut on her cheek and her arm and her ankle looks red and swollen even from this distance. She scoops up a handful of water and holds it up, saying, “Look! Tadpoles!”

Her smile is brilliant, shining like the moon and stars and sun. Her skin is dusky brown from the tan she’s gotten from her adventures outside. She’s got woodchips in her hair and water on all her clothes.

You slide down the bank, careful not to lose your footing on the loose soil, and walk over to her. Your heart is beating nearly out of your chest as you walk over to her. “Are you all right? Your leg lookth awful.”

She rolls her eyes at you and holds out the tadpoles in her hands again. “I’ll be fine. Come here and check this out!”

Grumbling, you sigh and crouch down beside her. You reach out a hand, automatically, and put it on her arm. She looks up from her tadpoles to your face and then smiles gently. She looks back down to the tadpoles and you blushed, looking at the little baby frogs also.

You don’t know what you would do without Aradia. You’re just a stupid kid but…

You love her.


	2. 18

Normally you really enjoy your personal space. You have a couple of friends you go out and do things with, but every now and then you just need time to yourself. Your parents were good at giving you space when you needed it, always letting you run about in the woods or around town as long as you were safe. Even after that summer in highschool when you nearly broke your ankle while out in the woods with Sollux, you kept your freedom.

Admittedly, a lot of that freedom was restricted to where you could go on crutches, but it was still freedom.

Sollux was one of those friends that you called on when you wanted some company. Unlike others, like Vriska or Tavros, he would always come. Always.

So when you go back on your decision to go camping alone on New Years Eve, at eighteen years old, which is your right as a newfound adult, and call Sollux at eleven thirty at night, the only one you even think of calling is Sollux.

He’s the only one you know will come out at the middle of the night, even if he is at some party (he isn’t), and show up with a backpack full of clothing and maybe some booze he filched from his parents cupboards.

There’s a foot of snow outside and the moonlight makes everything a silver grey, from the frosted trees to the breath coming out of his mouth. He’s shivering badly, bundled up in his old jacket.

You unzip the front of your tent and stick your head out, “You made it. I was worried you’d get the directions wrong.”

“Follow the thream b-bed all the w-way up patht the thtupid w-water mill cabin and take a left at the rock that lookth like it’th from the l-lion king. How could I mith thith plathe? Now let me in, I’m fucking f-freething out here.” He shifted from foot to foot in the snow.

You unzipped it the rest of the way and laughed when he came in, brushing snow from his shoulders and his hair. He dumps his bag by the door and kneels down on your sleeping bag. You zip up the door behind him and then reach for your thermos. You share your hot chocolate with him.

The two of you kneel on your sleeping bag, sharing the warm drink and companionable silence. After you get to the dregs of the cocoa, Sollux checks his phone and says, “Happy New Year, AA.”

You smile to him and nod. “Happy New Year, Sollux.”

You lean over and pull him into a hug. He scoots closer to you and hugs back. It goes on a little long, but you blame the chill. He shivers when you finally pull away.

“You get cold way too easily,” you pull open the sleeping bag and gesture for him to get inside. “Come on, get in.”

“I brought thome wine, don’t you want to drink that?”

You shrug. “Nah, not really. It tastes bad and the hot chocolate is a better taste. So climb in so we can keep warm.”

“Keep…Warm…” He cheeks turned a dark red and he shifted so he could sit inside the sleeping bag with you.

You laugh and push him down as well. You zip the sleeping bag up around the both of you, smiling as he blushes all the way up to his ears. “Stop being so weird. I’m not going to bite you.”

He mumbles something you can’t hear correctly but puts his arms around you and his chin on top of your head. You snuggle up to him, putting your cheek against his chest. “Thith ith how you wanted to thtart your new year? Camping in the middle of the woodth?”

“Yeah. I wanted to wake up in my most favorite place in the world.”

“Oh.”

You smile when he goes quiet, pulling you tighter in his hug. His fingers gently, uncertainly, trail through your hair. You yawn against his chest and when he realizes you’re not going to hit him for touching your hair without explicit permission, he starts twirling your hair around his fingers.

In the warmth of the sleeping bag, and with his arms around you, you fall asleep.

* * *

Morning served only to turn the inside of your tent from a dark near-black-blue color to a lighter cyan color. It was only what you deserved for getting a blue tent. All the light filtered through the cloth turned that eerie color.

You turn your head to look away from the top of your tent and can’t help but smile at what you see.

Sollux has scrunched himself down farther in the sleeping bag. You can feel his legs and arms holding tightly onto you, tighter than he ever would hold you if he was awake. He’s got a tight little scowl on his lips and sleep crud in the corners of his eyes. His head is right next to yours now, instead of above it, and his mouth is open. He snores, just a little, just enough for you to notice. You lick your thumb and reach over, wiping the crusty drool from the corner of his mouth. It’s pathetically adorable.

You touch his cheek gently with your fingertips and then slide your hand past his ear towards his hair. He’s taken his glasses off so you can see his stupidly long lashes. Why did guys always have the longest lashes anyway? It was preposterous.

He had a too pointy chin and sharp cheekbones and a silly snub nose and he as just so…

So pretty.

You lean forward and kiss his chin, smiling when he mumbles in his sleep. You love this skinny, shows up in the middle of the night just because you ask him too, boy so much.


	3. 22

Clingy is one of those descriptions of yourself that tends to make you lose girlfriends. They don’t like it when you text too much, or show up at their apartment when you need to see them, even if you bring pizza or chocolate or something they like. Not even the extremely cuddly Feferi enjoyed it when you showed up in the middle of a Saturday evening with a bottle of wine. Swathed in a robe she had pouted at you when you ruined her pampering night.

That relationship didn’t last another month.

It even put some strain on your regular friendships, making Karkat pissed at you from time to time when you got too into his business. Hacking a friend’s computer wasn’t, apparently, everyone’s idea of checking in on a friend.

That had kept him from talking to you for three months.

Sometimes you just really needed someone to be around, be it a friend or a girlfriend or, in a worst case scenario, a stranger. It was a part of your issues, issues that you didn’t seem to have an end to. The worst part was that to you it was normal. Sometimes you needed to be isolated, and then days later you needed to be with someone for twenty four hours straight. It was just how you were.

There was only ever one person that you tried to restrain yourself around, one person you didn’t want to drive away no matter what. Aradia.

You’d been in love with her since you were fifteen, and now that you were twenty two and finally sort of dating her, chasing her away with your insanity was out of the question. Not that she wouldn’t know you were crazy, she had been your friend for years. But if there was anything you knew about Aradia, it was that sometimes she needed her space. She needed her space and even when you needed her you backed off.

At least, that was the rule you’d set up for yourself. It had lasted, lasted until one mild spring afternoon when she was taking a few hours to pamper herself and you’d gone a week without conscious interaction with another person. The two of you had been living together for a month or two, not for very long at all.

She was in the middle of her bath when you dragged yourself out of your self-declared office room. You could hear the soft jazz instrumental playing from the bathroom. All the lights were off, but the door was open and so you could see the flickering flame of the candles in the hallway.

You lingered outside the door for minutes, watching the flame dancing across the plaster. After a while, though, you turn around the corner and step into the bathroom.

Aradia looks up at your footstep and gives you a little smile in her red lips. The bubbles are everywhere and very, very pink. Her head and shoulders and the toes of her left foot are the only things above the bubbles of the bath. You stand awkwardly in the doorway.

“Sollux?”

You look down to your toes in socks and feel awful for imposing on her personal time. “I need to be with you.”

Aradia sits up in the water, the bubbles cling to her skin. She reaches her hand out towards you and says, “Well you can’t wear clothing into the bath, can you?”

The joy that burns through you is hotter than the chill of the loneliness or the fear of rejection. You shrug out of your clothes faster than you ever have before, leaving pants and shirt and boxers on the floor. You tug off the socks last of all and then sit on the edge of the bath. Aradia tugs on your arm until you’re climbing into the hot water with her. The bubbles smell like flowers, and so does she. You lift up her hand and kiss her palm, then her wrist. She sighs and her eyelashes flutter.

You sink into the water with her and slip in closer. Hesitantly, you lay your cheek down on her shoulder and stretch your body along hers. She puts one arm around your shoulders and laughs softly when you kiss her neck. Straddling her thighs and with your arms loosely around her waist, you smile and close your eyes.

She runs fingers through your hair and after a while she pulls your glasses off and puts them on the floor outside the tub.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, focusing so you don’t slip back into a lisp because of your comfort with her. “For interrupting your private time.”

She turns to kiss your temple and then chuckles against your skin, “It’s fine, Sollux. Besides, you need a bath.”

You have to laugh there, because if you didn’t laugh you’d start kissing her like crazy. You believe her when she says it’s okay. You believe her when she pardons your behavior.

And there’s only one reason why she would.

Aradia loves you.


	4. 25

Even on the mornings where you went to bed late the night before, you were early to rise. Ever since you were a kid you got up at the crack of dawn without the use of a clock. Honestly, you never had much use of a clock in the first place. These days, even with your bedroom in the west, you get up to see the glory of the sun rising. Only, to view the painted horizon, you have to go to the kitchen.

Your bedroom is a soft grey in the pre-dawn light on this particular morning. You awake alone in bed, which really isn’t a surprise. Rubbing your eyes to get the crud from the corners, you look around the room to see if Sollux made it to bed at all last night. There’s no sign of him, though, not passed out on the floor or the chair by your dresser. His side of the bed is relatively undisturbed as well. Last you had seen, at midnight, he had been coding at his computer at full tilt, headphones on and eyes on the screen, while he was chewing on his bottom lip. You doubted he even realized the time, had barely recognized you when you went to kiss his cheek before you went to sleep.

Sliding from the bed, you find your slippers and put them on. You debate putting on a robe, but the morning is warm enough that your shirt and his borrowed boxers are enough. After making a pit stop in the bathroom, you head to the kitchen.

There’s shuffling in there and you enter to find Sollux, with pants forgotten, at the stove. He turns to go to the fridge and you see his glasses are balanced precariously at the end of his nose. His eyes are half open. It looks like he’d fallen asleep after all, in his chair no doubt.

You have to smile when he pulls out milk from the fridge, sniffs it, looks like he’s about to drink from the carton and then stops himself. He grumbles under his breath. You can hear the faint whistling of his lisping. You think he looks unbearably cute, stumbling around with his eyes half open and his rumple shirt pulled up so he can scratch at his back.

You walk up to the window by the sink and pull open the blinds. The room fills up with the rosy orange-red glow of the dawn and Sollux jumps. “AA?”

You wave your fingers at him, giggling when he shoves his glasses up on his face. “Mornin’ love. How was your work?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “Piece of shit was giving me trouble all night. But I’ll get nowhere working on it like this.”

You lean in and kiss his cheek. “So you’re going to sleep for a while?”

He nods and goes to kiss you back. But he misses your cheek, and your mouth, and gets the side of your nose instead. You laugh and bat at his arm. “You really do need some sleep!”

You turn to get a mug out of the cupboard, so you can make yourself some tea, when Sollux puts his hand on your shoulder, “AA, here. I made this for you, the way you like.”

In surprise, you turn back and look. He hands you a mug of steaming tea. It’s got a swirl of white milk in it, even. You hold the warm mug in your hands, blinking in surprise. He leans in and gives you a quick peck on the lips. “Didn’t miss that time,” he mumbles against your lips. Then he turns away.

He gets out of the kitchen before your brain starts working properly again. You sip the tea that he’s prepared for you and smile. It’s perfect.

A quick glance around the kitchen tells you that everything he got out was just to make you tea. The kettle on the stove steams quietly on a front burner. The wrapper is out on the counter, next to the honey pot. The only thing missing is the milk, which he put away.

A warmth spread through you that had nothing to do with the tea, and nothing to do with the warming sunlight. He thought of you when he was too exhausted even to code.

 He loved you.


End file.
